The impact of computer use on adolescents` social relationship and school adjustment: An analysis of Korean Youth Panel Survey data

This study aims to identify the impact of adolescents' computer use on their social relationship and school adjustment. Studies on adolescents' media use have been steadily under way, expanding its focus from television to new media like computer or mobile phone. Adolescents' computer use is also acting as one of major study themes in educational studies. However, there is little interdisciplinary study on adolescents' computer use in Korea. This study therefore purposes to combine a communicative question over the impact of media use on social relationship with an educational question over which factors affect school adjustment: If adolescents computer use affect their social relationship and the social relationship influence their school adjustment, it indicates that computer use has direct or indirect impact on school adjustment. The first- to fourth- year data from the Korea Youth Panel Survey was used. The data was collected by National Youth Policy Institute from 3,449 students nationwide who were in the second grade at middle school in 2003. To answer the research questions, cross-sectional time series analysis was conducted. The result shows that computer use variously influences adolescents relationship with their friends, teachers, and parents according to the amount of use, goal of use, and type of use, and it also affects school adjustment. In addition, social relationship acts as not only a major variable that predicts school adjustment, but also a factor that eliminates or reduces the negative impacts of computer use on school adjustment. The key results of the study are as follows: First, the amount of computer use has negative impacts on adolescents social relationship and school adjustment. Second, relationship-oriented type of use predicted stronger emotional attachment to friends, teachers, and parents. But, some activities that constitute relationship-oriented use like e-mail, community, and web posting weaken such an attachment. Third, playing computer game turned out to positively affect the relationship with parents and teachers. Fourth, adolescents social relationship reduces or eliminates the negative impacts of computer use on school adjustment while it does not diminishes the positive impacts. Finally, the ties between computer use and school adjustment can be explained by whether adolescents use computer to enhance their relationship with real world or not